About

General Overview

Natalie (Kida), owner of the Chronic Pain Café, has increasingly shown herself to be untrustworthy and has been to court on July 29th after being caught shoplifting following a police investigation for her severe kleptomania issues.

She has also demonstrated poor leadership and management skills, running the café as a dictator without any input from staff or members. All café members are unaware of actions she will take or when she will take them and members are afraid to speak themselves freely due to repeated patterns of behaviour where Natalie has banned/kicked members from the café for doing so. The café needs to be run as a community, a home, where members will be safe regardless of disagreements with Natalie that may or may not make sense. The café can not be run based on one person’s whims.

Strikes

The Incident With [Mod 1] – mid to end of May, 2022
- [Mod 1] made a lot of strong statements that made several users uncomfortable, including both triggering statements about how she treated her children and a strong anti-vaccine stance. One of the members who was deeply uncomfortable and triggered by [Mod 1]’s commentaries regarding vaccines contacted her in an attempt at a resolution, but although [Mod 1] apologized, she did not take responsibility for her part in the conflict. After [Mod 1] continued to post anti-vaccination commentary throughout the Café, the user felt that for the sake of their own mental health they had to block [Mod 1]. Several months passed and this was finally discovered by Natalie and her mods. Instead of attempting to mediate the conflict, Natalie berated the user for having a mod blocked, an action that several Café members openly disagreed with and found to be unreasonable. This caused the member to leave to protect their own peace of mind, posting a saddened goodbye message in the Café.
- As a result of the public goodbye message, [Mod 1] was abruptly demoted without warning or consultation from the other mod. [Mod 1] then called Natalie in tears, sobbing and heartbroken at the demotion. After this private phone call with Natalie, she was just as quickly promoted again–still with no consultation with current mods or Café members. This resulted in several more members leaving–nearly all of them permanently. The only one of those members who was noticed or at least commented on was Pie (known as Purple at the time), who returned after the other mod Jess reached out in concern as they had been a fairly active member for nearly a year at that point.
- [Mod 1] remained a mod from that point forth, steadily decreasing her activity more and more until 2024 when she pulled back entirely, messaging very rare short messages, and only ever in the mod channel. Due to the situation described in Strike 15, Folie and Pie raised concerns around [Mod 1] continuing to remain a mod despite a near year of absence in the Café, to which Natalie’s response was that she pities [Mod 1] and didn’t want to make her life “harder” by demoting her “unfairly”.

The Ticket Problem – on January 13-15th, 2024 & March 12th, 2024.
- January: Natalie jumps into multiple support tickets already being handled by Sylvie. In one of those support tickets, Natalie inflames the situation with a member, then suggests a ban in the admin channels for the member being “annoying”. Sylvie dissuades the ban, but the ticket is closed passive aggressively by Natalie after she sent the last word and did not leave time for the member to respond.
- March: Natalie requested Sylvie to draft a final warning message to the member, which was reviewed and edited by the admin staff, including Natalie, and was sent to the member in a ticket. The member capitulated to the demands in the message immediately and with no argument. Unsatisfied with the outcome that would otherwise have been considered best case, Natalie suddenly threatened to ban the member if they didn’t also apologize of their own volition, without Natalie having ever asked for the apology. Natalie eventually closed the ticket without further discussion from the other mods.
- Before she had closed the ticket, Natalie sent a private DM to the member blaming Sylvie (by her real name which was not previously known by the member) for the message entirely. She falsely claimed to have not reviewed the message prior to sending it. This then settled the matter privately outside the Café. Natalie did not disclose to the staff members this messaging until pressed to later due to the other mods’ confusion.
- Upon discovering the falsehoods Natalie had privately messaged the member in order to resolve the issue, Sylvie expressed to Natalie the disappointment and sadness at being used as a scapegoat. She also expressed valid frustration at Natalie breaking her own rule of keeping member discourse in the Café tickets for transparency. Natalie acknowledged she used Sylvie as a scapegoat, and insisted that she should get credit for being transparent in this admission, and for sending the screenshots to the records channel afterwards when pressed to. The transparency of matters handled by mods in the Café is a bare minimum expected of all mods, Natalie included. Lastly, Natalie did not apologize to Sylvie until a later time for these transgressions until she was asked explicitly to do so.

The Jr. Chronic Pain Café – on July 30th, 2024.
- For a brief month or so, the Café began to allow minors into the Café. During this brief test period, several members vocally and frequently stated their discomfort with this allowance. Natalie then proposed that a Jr. Café should be created after it was made clear that was something that needed to be resolved. Despite the strong vocal objections of a very large number of Café members, a sister discord Café server specifically for minors was created. Natalie "volun-told" Sylvie that she was assigned to be the "Lead Admin" reasoning that she should do so because she was the youngest of the mods. Sylvie declined, uncomfortable with being the on-call adult for a whole server of minors. Natalie was clearly offended when Sylvie didn’t dive at the opportunity, saying, "I thought you would be honoured." Eventually, it was decided that a fairly new member, who is no longer part of the Café, would instead fill this position.

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The Group Ban Situation – on August 10th, 2024
- The Lead Admin of the Jr. Chronic Pain Café posted in the main Café NSFW content that was considered extremely inappropriate to users, so much so that multiple active and long-time members called for a ban. The ban was served by Natalie, though very reluctantly, despite her explicitly agreeing it was a horrible offense.
- That member then went on almost immediately to form a group chat with several members who were still in the Café. Users in that group began gossiping behind the backs of members in the Café through shared screenshots of the vent channel. In this chat, they diminished Café members’ hardships, saying they had it worse than those making the posts. An emergency staff meeting was called. A solid hour was spent verbally trying to convince Natalie that the extreme violation of privacy was indeed an issue that needed to be addressed. At the end of the long meeting, the decision was made to ban the members of the group for creating such an unsafe environment.
- After the mass banning, Natalie decided she still wanted to reach out to the member that had initiated all of this. She tried to apologize to said former member, saying she still liked her.

A continuation from the above, one of the first members to have joined the Café who was active and well-liked, was one of the members to be banned from the Café for having been part of that group. It is still unclear whether this member contributed to the screenshots, gossipping, or had even been active at all in any way in this group. Natalie sent a DM to this member (what she said in this DM is still unknown as this was another private DM outside the Café), but due to medical emergencies, the member was unable to respond. Due to the very short time period allotted to respond regarding the matter, she was also banned. It was later discovered that this now former member was cut off from pretty much all former friends in the Café due to the drama surrounding the incident.

Syl's Demotion and Resignation – on September 18-24th, 2024.
- Natalie, following her pattern with previous staff, randomly removed admin permissions from Sylvie and intentionally kept her in the dark about her plans to demote her. When Sylvie asked about the lack of permissions, Natalie feigned ignorance, laughing with other staff and talking behind Sylvie’s back about how amused she was at her frustration, all while Sylvie still believed her to be a close and trusted friend.
- Natalie intentionally obscured the resulting resignation message attempted by Sylvie, keeping all members in the dark about staffing changes and effectively silencing a member of the community.
- Natalie talked down to Sylvie for months afterwards in the Café, saying in private that she needed to "dumb herself down" to her level. Natalie then ghosted Sylvie in DMs for 6 months afterwards, justifiably causing Sylvie to feel hurt and significantly withdraw from the Café due to mistrust.
- After a year of little to no communication between them, Natalie randomly reached out to Syl's mother to complain after Syl declined to visit Natalie while she was visiting in state to look after Pie following a medical procedure.

From Kida, slightly edited to preserve privacy of the other party:

In March 2025, Natalie was fired from her job at Best Buy after she was caught stealing at least $1K worth of both merchandise and money from her workplace.

When Natalie was stealing from both her workplace and other stores, she regularly used Folie and Pie as covers, saying that they had sent money and/or bought the items for her when her boyfriend whom she lived with became suspicious. She has admitted to Pie that she has stolen tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of items, enough to count as grand larceny.

In late May 2025, Pie is added to the staff as a mod to replace Syl after she’d stepped down and especially to take over the role of posting the weeklies. No one is consulted about this decision, not even Pie. Pie had mentioned that they would enjoy doing the weekly posts because Natalie had not been keeping up with them, and then suddenly they were a mod. None of the members are made aware of this decision.

In early June of 2025, the police began an investigation due to Natalie’s theft and she was caught. A court date was set for the end of July to determine the legal consequences of the theft. Natalie has remained very apathetic about the upcoming event the entire time, from her arrest up to now, and has the utmost confidence that she is being tried for only the most recent event in which she was caught and that the store(s) are unaware of the scale and timeline (which is at least a year, according to conversations she had with Pie.)

Mid June 2025 – Natalie makes massive changes to the café structures and channels. No one is consulted on this or given any sort of prior heads up to the changes–including the mods–and the café was likened to a “dictatorship” by members.

In mid July 2025, multiple incidents occurred in rapid succession. The first of which was when Folie and Pie had a serious conversation about mods needing the ability to provide input for how the Café runs, as well as the benefits of having a community based focus for running the Café rather than having Natalie continue to rule as a dictator (something Café members had been stating openly due to her behavior in the Caféat this point). For a few days, Natalie does involve them in a few discussions around the Café’s structure, specifically about channel names. This, however, does not last beyond those few days and 1 staff meeting in which the ideas were discussed. A mere few days later, Natalie kicks well over a dozen members for inactivity on Discord for 30+ days without discussing either her intent to do so, nor discussing whether it should be done at all.

Also, in mid July 2025, concerns were raised about a Café member who had been in DMs of a fellow Café member, asking for money. We are not sure of the scale of this issue as no other members have come forward. Discussions took place around whether to discipline this member and how, but without any resolution as the extent of the problem was unclear and there were no more incidents of this occurring even though staff hadn’t intervened yet. Less than a week later after the concerning matter was brought to staff attention, Natalie posted a personal GoFundMe asking members to donate money to replace her PC which she fried by spilling water on it. This violated the rule not allowing GFMs in the Café for non-medical needs, equipment, and the like, but it was also likewise a hypocritical action taken a very short time period after the aforementioned issue.

Mid July 2025 concerns are raised by Pie and folie regarding ownership of the Café, should Natalie go to jail. These concerns were raised largely in part because Natalie’s boyfriend–who is not a part of the café and never has been–has frequently been given full access and control to do anything to the Café server without consultation or consent from any mods or Café members.
- When Folie and Pie brought this concern to Natalie, her justification for this was that he handles the “technical maintenance” side of things, without clarifying what that actually entails. She pushed back quite heavily, essentially saying that she was fine with the situation, so we should be fine with it. No agreement was made, and the full access and control remains intact.
- When preparing for how to handle the café without Natalie, should she be jailed, Pie and folie asked how to ensure the café’s continual thriving but Natalie shrugs this off saying it isn’t a concern and we need not bother with any of that.

20 July 2025 – Natalie demoted folie from admin status and removed their permissions. She did not tell folie or Pie that this was occurring, instead preferring to message Pie after she had done so, to tell folie about their decreased permissions. She justified this by saying that she had interpreted an earlier conversation as folie being uncomfortable running the café in her absence (there was no indication of folie being uncomfortable, folie volunteered to run the café). After announcing this to Pie, she turned her phone to Do Not Disturb and said she was “taking a break”

During her “break” from the café, she had been ignoring any and all attempted communications from folie, preferring to use Pie to communicate on her behalf. However, she has been online and has been making changes to the café and to folie’s permissions but without communicating to folie themselves.

Knowingly triggered a person with substance abuse disorder because she “thought it was funny”

Recurring Issues

Problems we’ve had that happen repeatedly even after confronting her about it:

She has regularly threatened to delete the cafe when things don’t go her way.
She doesn't follow the rules she made for the cafe:
- 20 July 2025, Natalie is asked to remove her GoFundMe by folie (with which Pie agreed) as it wasn’t appropriate or in line with café rules due to it being personal and not medical. She instead rewrote the GFM to be in line with café rules.
- 24 July 2025 Kida posted a picture of Estella in general chat instead of pets and plants, when confronted she deleted the message of the mod confronting her and dméd the mod saying it wasn't an issue.
When giveaways have occurred in the cafe, money and donations have been sent to Natalie. There has been no transparency between the staff as to where this money has gone and what it has been spent on. For example, all staff pitched in for the 4th anniversary and even when there was supposedly $250 earmarked for the giveaway, cafe members have had to use their own personal money for fulfilling the cash giveaways. This occurred over 2 months after the giveaway ended and the staff members have not been refunded.
During each giveaway, especially during the biggies on the café anniversary, she has repeatedly not sent the promised gifts and money until up to 6 months after the giveaway event.
There have also been instances where Natalie has refused to use a person’s correct name and pronouns. In conversations with others, Natalie has referred to folie as their offline name and with she/her pronouns exclusively despite all members of the cafe being aware that folie prefers not to use their offline name where possible and prefers they/them pronouns. She also referred to Pie by their offline name when giving updates on their health when supporting them after surgery, despite knowing that Pie does not want their offline name to be used in online spaces.
There has been a concerning pattern of behavior where Kida has taken to the DMs of an individual to complain about others in the cafe. This has happened in particular with folie, who was swayed against one person specifically. However, since folie has taken a step away from the cafe, Kida has been in other DMs attempting to trash their name by accusing folie of “judging” and “chastising” her when she spilled water on her PC, which never happened.
Kida has also flaunted her knack of getting personal information about others and behaving in a way that seems obsessive. She has sent members pictures of their apartment blocks unprompted and has used their personal information to find out more about them - knowing their full name, their college degree, their address...